Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald delivered a memorable and hard-hitting speech at the University of Utah in April 2015 titled “Edward Snowden and the Secrets of the National Security State.” His remarks focused on the National Security Agency’s collection of ordinary law-abiding U.S. citizens’ communications. He emphasized that, even then, nearly eight years ago, people had ceded too much of their independence to unaccountable bureaucrats without even realizing it. If that trend continued, he argued, America would soon be closer to a totalitarian state than a democracy.
He was right.
Two years earlier, during his work on the Snowden story, Greenwald had been privy to a vast quantity of classified government material (courtesy of Snowden). He had reported on the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program, initiated following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.” At the time of the article, Greenwald reached out to a senior Obama administration official who said this program had ended in 2011.
What this official left out was that Stellar Wind had been replaced by other more invasive data collection programs. Greenwald wrote about one new program that actually led to a “doubling of the amount of data passing through its filters” (emphasis added).
